In 1762 the Massachusetts General Assembly directed its agent, Jasper Maudit, to defend the colony's charter rights from a challenge by the crown and its imperial officers. In this latest push for greater central control the crown aimed to require the assent of the Privy Council for all future Massachusetts laws. Defending the colony, Maudit cited the arguments of John Locke and the provisions of Massachusetts's charter. He argued that the colonists' rights were natural and equal to those of any other British subject and included a right to be governed by legislative power based on consent. Moreover, by settling and improving land previously uninhabited, except by those whom the migrants considered stateless Indians, the colonists contributed to imperial prosperity and liberty, in their view enhancing the status of their rights. It is common for historians to read arguments of these kinds as evidence of an emerging spirit of colonial independence that fed into the looming imperial crisis and ultimate struggle for self-rule. But Craig Yirush wants to reorientate our view, away from the American Revolution and back to the source of these claims in the late seventeenth century. In Settlers, Liberty, and Empire: The Roots of Early American Political Theory, 1675–1775 he maintains that while historians have gotten used to searching for the origins of late eighteenth-century colonial political culture in English legal and Renaissance political inheritances, they should look for these beginnings closer to home, in a long-standing contest with an aggressive and ambitious eighteenth-century English state.
The introduction sets out the author's historiographical sympathies and targets. Yirush begins by observing that the history of early American political thought has not really moved on since the disagreement between liberal and republican arguments of the 1980s, with the latter proving unsustainable in the face of evidence for the influence of liberal ideas of rights, property, and consent. In the interim, while cultural and social history have been revolutionized by Atlantic and imperial turns, early American intellectual history has mostly failed to keep up, even with developments in its own wider field. Here he has two bodies of scholarship in mind. First, a constitutional-law tradition, most notably studies by Barbara Black, John Philip Reid, and Jack Greene (under whose supervision this book first took shape as a Johns Hopkins doctoral thesis), which, in common with the republican synthesis, rejected a simplistic emphasis on Lockean natural law, emphasizing instead English legal arguments and traditions. Drawing on J. G. A. Pocock's earlier work on England's ancient constitution, this approach describes how colonists relied upon the early seventeenth-century common-law arguments of Edward Coke and others intended to defend legal sovereignty from Stuart absolutism. Yirush accepts these findings but insists on renewed attention to the second body of scholarship, natural-law theory, which, recent studies have shown, had more complicated roots than their previous and more or less singular association with John Locke maintained – for example in the work of Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, as described by Richard Tuck and others, and in the outpouring of Civil War radicalism recovered by post-revisionist English historians. In fact, by the mid-seventeenth century, common-law rights were routinely identified as natural, at least for Englishmen, and combined with the flourishing of republican ideas before and especially during and after the English Civil Wars to transform Anglo-Atlantic political culture in ways that informed the colonists' thought about their relationships with each other, the Indians, and empire.
The book is in three parts. The first, “Restoration and Rebellion,” offers two chapters considering the novel imperial policies of Charles II and James II, especially their attempt to centralize the empire, and the colonial response, wherein the settlers first articulated a sense of their rights as Englishmen. The second part, “Empire,” considers London's attempt to bolster imperial authority in wake of late seventeenth-century colonial rebellions. Early on this initiative is led by the Board of Trade, which tries to revoke the charters of private colonies and weaken colonial autonomy by insisting on the Crown's right to review colonial legislation. When the Board of Trade turns for support to Parliament, itself a rising constitutional power, the stage is set for an assertion of Westminster's sovereignty in the colonies. This general development is traced in four case studies of struggles across the eighteenth century. Part Three, “Revolution,” traces the continuing actions on behalf of imperial reform through the descent into revolution following the reinvigoration of the Board of Trade in 1748. Officials who had long harboured designs on colonial autonomy assumed control. Following a financially ruinous final conflict with the French, these new administrators focussed on colonial reform as a way to recoup finances and assert imperial prerogative, setting the stage for the familiar narrative of the journey from resistance to revolution.
In this view the core problem of eighteenth-century American politics was the ambiguous seventeenth-century legal legacy regarding the colonists' status and rights. Beginning with Calvin's Case (1603) English legal opinion on political subjectivity addressed problems concerning the status of Scots, after the uniting of the two kingdoms under James I, and the Irish, whose lands the English claimed by right of conquest. This emerging imperial jurisprudence provided only a partial explanation for the constitutional status of the American subjects and their relation to metropolitan authorities. For if crown officials could claim that the colonies were fruits of conquest and the colonists enjoyed their rights as a revocable monarchical grant, settlers could assert their status and rights as English subjects under the law and, in particular, a right to consensual government. The confusion was exacerbated by the colonies' piecemeal growth and the granting of corporate or proprietary charters by which the crown delegated its prerogatives – such as the power to tax, to pass laws, to create courts, to assemble militias – in order to encourage migration, guaranteeing holders the legal rights and privileges of English subjects. Over time, and one would have to say not altogether unreasonably, the settlers came to consider the charters written and fixed guarantees of their rights and liberties extending beyond the realm. But these legal guarantees and the accretion of custom and practice left many questions unanswered: could the crown revoke the charters, or did the settlers enjoy legal protections as a matter of right? What did a non-repugnancy clause – the requirement that colonial law be in keeping with English law – mean given differences in circumstances? What were the status and rights of the indigenous people and the land that the colonists now claimed as their own?
None of this mattered much while the crown was busy with other domestic and international affairs which meant that it paid scant interest to the colonies. However, following the Restoration the Stuarts were determined to continue reforms begun under Cromwell and tighten up control on colonial trade to the disadvantage of Dutch and French competition – thus the introduction of new Navigation Acts, action against colonial charters and land patents, and the dispatch of military governors such as Edmund Andros to oversee the Dominion of New England. Faced with a concerted attempt to increase central control, the emerging colonial elite responded with a notably uniform defence of their rights as Englishmen abroad. Rejecting a characterization as subjects of conquered lands governed by royal prerogative, the colonists claimed the rights of freeborn Englishmen possessed of chartered guarantees that encouraged them to risk their lives and fortunes in expanding the king's dominion overseas. The Glorious Revolution left the colonies fragmented, but the Stuart ambition for greater central control persisted, most noticeably in the establishment in 1696 of the Board of Trade, which embarked on a series of measures to extend royal authority in pursuit of commercial controls, revenue, and military victory over the French.
It is these campaigns and the colonists' responses and resistance that Yirush finds more or less fully formed as early as 1721 and Jeremiah Dummer's Defense of the New England Charters (1721), and thereafter picks out in supporting case studies. In addition to Dummer, we consider John Buckley's defense of Connecticut settlers' seizure of twenty thousand acres of Mohegan land, Daniel Dulany's The Right of the Inhabitants of Maryland to the Benefit of the English Laws (1728), and the disputes over a tax on land levied by the royal governor and payments to Anglican clergy, otherwise known as the “Parson's Cause,” that shattered erstwhile peaceful relations between colonists and crown in 1750s Virginia. A set of common themes emerges to counteract the claim of royal prerogative in the fifty years after the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht: the crown had no claim to the colonial territories on the basis of inheritance or conquest; the colonists enjoyed their title by right of purchase from the Natives, not a grant of the crown; the colonists treated the Natives well and improved the land with their labour; the king's patents had been worthless, until the settlers expended the required effort in cultivation; the colonists would never have undertaken this cultivation of the wilderness had their rights and privileges been insecure; charters were quasi-contractual and received in exchange for service to the king; this service to the empire placed colonial charters on firmer legal grounds than corporations in England; local, charter governments were more conducive to liberty than distant, royal rule because of principles of proximity and consent; colonies brought benefits to empire which were vital in the defense against the French and against popery; the common law and English rights applied to the inhabitants of the colonies. All these arguments and more were supported with liberal references to Locke, natural rights, and republican traditions and fostered a colonial political culture that articulated a more or less federal vision of the relationship between crown and colonies.
Whitehall, of course, took a rather different view, and the book's final section reviews the development of imperial attitudes from the Glorious Revolution and the shift of colonial oversight from royal bureaucracy to the Parliamentary ministry. Early eighteenth-century reform aimed to strengthen Indian alliances and military efforts against the French, as well as increase colonial quitrents and cut down on smuggling. They failed in pretty much all respects, owing to colonial resistance and, mostly, the crown's unwillingness to invest resources necessary to enforce centralized authority. This left colonial governors at the mercy of increasingly assertive assemblies. A long period of Whig hegemony encouraged a laissez-faire approach and allowed the accretion of colonial power at the expense of royal authority. The empire also became more integrated. As David Armitage has argued, the decades after the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht witnessed the thickening of social, commercial, political, and cultural bonds in an empire that was Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free. The American colonies were a sideshow compared to more compelling European diplomatic ups and downs. However, things changed in the 1740s following Walpole's fall, London's action against colonial paper money, and new calls for vetoes of colonial legislation that contravened royal instructions. Colonial opposition was swift and on occasion riotous, further persuading London of the need to strengthen the colonial executive. In 1748 the return of war with the French produced yet more calls for assertive royal command. There was even support in the colonies, for example in Pennsylvania, with its exposed western frontiers neglected by eastern legislatures and commercial interests. The final crisis comes following the defeat of France, which left England with an empty treasury and a vast new empire to administer.
Overall, this is a well-researched and well-organized book that will be great for teaching. It will be especially effective in providing a foil for the usual approach to eighteenth-century political culture that glances back, maybe, to the 1730s or the 1740s before focussing on the familiar post-1763 narrative. Some may find the intellectual-history approach a bit old-fashioned and one could make the customary challenges to the consensual tone in claims about how “the colonists” felt about “their” status and rights. At least part of the reason why scholars lost interest in the liberal-versus-republican debate was that it was conducted in the abstract, with claims rather than demonstrations for how these ideas mattered in wider society. More recent attempts have sought grounds for a shared political culture in consumption and sensibility, or in law and labour relations which preserve some sense of intracolonial struggle and contest that is largely absent here, except for European–Indian differences. That said, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire does an excellent job of combining recent developments in intellectual and constitutional legal scholarship with well-crafted case studies and deserves to become a fixture on undergraduate and graduate reading lists.
